


it goes like this

by ice_connoisseur



Series: it well may be [4]
Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Gen, Torchwood Crossover, Yes Really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2020-10-04 21:29:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20477747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: “It’s your father’s fault, of course,” Kate’s mother had sighed.





	it goes like this

**Author's Note:**

> Ah. My baby AU of unknown source, the plans I had for you. There’s a part of me that is very sad this will never be complete. 
> 
> Some of it is close to finished, other bits are more skeletal, and many parts haven’t even been written down. But I’m proud of it, proud of the idea and the start of the execution, and I wanted to share it.

Caitlin Todd is eight and three quarters when she dies for the first time, the ground giving way beneath her feet, rushing black and the rattle of earth and pebbles. 

It is a long way to fall.

The local newspapers plaster her face all over the front pages, hail the durability of young bones, and calculate the odds of surviving such a drop. What no one seems at all interested in is her dogged insistence that it wasn’t a miracle of survival at all. She _died_. She knows it, understands it in a way she can’t explain. But no one will listen; they smile and pat her head and say _but you didn’t, sweetie, of course you didn’t, isn’t it amazing?_

She may only be eight years and three quarters, but Caitlin Todd is pretty sure that dying and _not staying dead _is even more amazing.

Not that anyone listens when you’re only eight.

Eventually, her mother pulls her aside, sits her down quietly and tries to explain. _It is a secret, darling_ she had said, hands twisting anxiously in her lap_. A secret for you and I only, and you mustn’t ever tell anyone, not even Daddy or the boys or Rachel. Keep it secret, or they’ll take you away and you’ll never see us again. Do you promise, Caitlin?_

She promised, because even at the age of almost-nine, Caitlin Todd understood there were some things you did not talk about.

(The details of that week of her childhood grow hazy with time, but some things never fade. The whistle of air rushing past her face as she fell, the blinding pain and echoing dark and jerking force of that first breath.

The look on her mother’s face as she said _promise, Caitlin, promise,_ fear and worry and that tinge of horror that never quite seemed to fade.

She hadn’t known, Kate would work out years later, not for sure, not until then).

* * *

She is nineteen when her father finds her, floundering in her first and last year as a law student. He turns up unannounced at her door, smiles and introduces himself, and over the course of the evening she laughs, cries, slaps him, apologises, slaps him again, and finally hugs him goodbye. He explains, as best he can, what little he knows and understands, and it helps, to finally talk about it. 

He doesn’t stay, though – can’t, apparently, though a little part of her thinks _won’t – _and though he keeps in touch, mostly by letter and later by email, it still feels a little like abandonment for the second time. That scares her almost more than her mother’s distanced lack of understanding, because it is the complete opposite. He does understand, only too well, and the distance here is due to fear of a different sort. 

Fear of loss and failure and rejection, fear of being too much and not enough and never quite fitting in. Her own fears magnified a thousand times, and it’s like he’s holding up a magnifying glass to all the ways it can and will go wrong. 

But at the same time, it gives her a sense of relief and release. Be happy, her father whispered into her hair as he kissed her goodbye, and she loves him for that, for wanting no more from her than she wants for herself.

She quits law the next day. That was always more her mother’s dream than her own, and she’s finally beginning to understand that nothing she does will ever be enough to apologise for something that isn’t her fault in the first place.

* * *

As secrets go, it’s actually a pretty easy one to keep. The Secret Service isn’t nearly as filled with explosions and brushes with death as the glossy network shows would have the public believe, and the occasional near-miss is easy to gloss over as luck or chance. Her superiors scold her for being too willing to take risks, too quick to put herself in danger to come to the aid of others, but when it comes down to it, the first requirement of a bodyguard is willingness to die for the person they’re protecting, and Kate never hesitates. She knows the danger of being found out, but it doesn’t stop her.

It’s not entirely selfless; if someone dies where she could have done so instead, she would have no choice but to live with the guilt.

* * *

NCIS…complicates things. 

If she’d been thinking straight she’d have realised right from the start what a bad idea it was. Federal agency it may be, but these people aren’t bodyguards. They are investigators, trained to see what others miss, so Tony loves to remind her, and it terrifies her that one day they might finally see what no one else ever has, some outward sign of her inner abnormality.

At first it is just exposure she fears, her mother’s tense words, _they’ll take you away, little one, and we’ll never see you again_, but as time passes it starts to dig deeper than that. Exposure, maybe, she could take, but not rejection, not again, not from these people. 

* * *

And then she goes and gets shot in the head.

* * *

She wakes with a gulp of air, panicked and hurting and dazed, and the first thing she sees is Tony staring down at her, frozen, his face splattered with her blood.

No one says anything for a very long time.

* * *

Abby and Ducky are waiting for them, anxious and confused, in Abby’s lab. Abby gasps when she sees the blood on Tony’s face, almost falls over when she sees the stain on Kate’s back, but Ducky takes one look at the expression Gibbs’s face and stills her with a gentle touch. 

“Is something wrong?” Abby whispers, eyes darting from one to the other, her _family_, apparently tearing themselves apart at the edges. 

“Kate got shot on the roof,” explains Tony in the same monotone he’s been using for the past two hours. “In the head. Smack between the eyes. Dropped like a stone. And then, and here’s the funny thing, she’s lying there completely dead when suddenly she’s breathing and blinking and moaning about a headache. Yeah, Abby, I’d say there’s something wrong.”

They all turn to look at Kate, standing by the door as if unsure of her welcome, arms wrapped tight around herself. She shrugs and attempts to smile.

“I don’t know either.”

“Really? Because you didn’t seem that surprised,” snaps Tony, and Kate doesn’t flinch, she _refuses_ to flinch.

“No. I’ve known the what and the why for a long time. I’ve never understood the how.”

“And you never told us?!” Tony explodes. “Never thought it was worth a mention, of yeah, by the way guys, I _can’t die_?!”

“Oh, I can die as well as anyone,” Kate snorts. “It’s the staying dead that is proving tricky. And what was I supposed to say? Why on earth would you have believed me?!”

“We’re meant to be a team, Kate! You’re supposed to trust us!”

“I do!”

“Yeah? Well you have a funny way of showing it!”

“Enough.” interrupts Gibbs, his voice quiet but full of steel. “DiNozzo, McGee, I want you back on that roof. Find me anything that might tell us where Ari’s gone now, and pick up that damn bullet before someone else sends it to forensics and finds her brain all over it. Abby, anything you can give me. Ducky, take her downstairs and check her over.”

Kate sighs, not even bristling at the way Gibbs is refusing to use her name.

“There’s nothing to see. I’m a federal agent, I’ve had as many physicals and medical tests done on me as the rest of you. If there was anything it would have been found by now.”

Gibbs doesn’t even bother glancing in her direction as leaves the room.

* * *

Ducky examines her in his calm, unflustered way, adapting his autopsy equipment for medical use as he has done so many times before.

“You can take some blood, if you like.” Kate offers at last, if only to break the silence. “I don’t mind. I don’t want you to get into trouble with Gibbs.”

“Why would I do that, my dear? They wouldn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. You are in perfect physical health, apart from what I imagine must be a severely painful headache.”

Kate blinks, surprised. “I’ve had worse. But that doesn’t…I mean, I don’t think you’ll find anything a horde of government physicals missed, but Gibbs is gonna want to know you at least tried.”

The doctor stares at her for a moment.

“Caitlin,” he began at last, picking his words with great care. “Do you believe our esteemed leader sent you to me so that I may attempt to uncover the reasoning behind your miraculous recovery?”

“Of course. Why else?”

“My dear, you _died_ in front of him. Unless I’m very much mistaken, his primary concern was to ensure there was no lasting damage.”

“But he was so angry,” Kate frowns. “Tony too. The looks on their faces…”

“They had just seen you gunned down in front of them. Tony is covered in your blood. Their anger, at this moment in time at least, is from an entirely separate source. They are probably hurt that you did not tell them, yes, but that will come later. Right now they are far more concerned about the fact that Ari Haswari killed you this afternoon. The fact that you didn’t stay dead is completely beside the point.”

* * *

“Hey, Kitten!”

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“I’m just happy to hear your voice. How are you?”

“I got shot.”

A sigh. “Where?”

“In the head. Straight between the eyes.”

“How many people saw?”

“My boss and my partner.”

“Do you need me to straighten things out?”

“Of course not.”

“Katie…”

“Don’t call me Katie.”

Another sigh. “Kate. Are you sure? I can have you on the first plane to Cardiff, they won’t even realise you’re gone until it’s too late. If they tell anyone, if someone comes for you over there, I don’t know how long it will take me to get to you.”

Kate twists the phone cord round her hand, wishing that it was last week, wishing that it was all a bad dream and she’d wake up tomorrow and everything would be normal, Tony wouldn’t be avoiding her, Abby wouldn’t be staring at her like she was some sort of freak, Gibbs wouldn’t be shooting terrorists in his basement with some Israeli spy as backup instead of her…

“No. I don’t want to leave unless I have to.”

“It might be too late by then.”

Kate pauses for a moment, her eyes wandering to a picture Abby had got the waitress to take when they’d been out for drinks on McGee’s last birthday. Her team smiles – or, in Gibb’s case, smirks – back at her.

“No. No, I don’t think it will be. I trust them.”

A third sigh, longer and louder than the rest.

“I want to hear from you at least once a day. Just something to let me know you’re ok.”

“I promise.”

“And Kitten?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

He hangs up before she can formulate a response. 

* * *

It takes a while to get things straightened out, after that, but the point is they get there, and Kate begins to hope that maybe they always will

* * *

It’s not that she doesn’t like Ziva David, not exactly. There is just something about her that makes her uncomfortable, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that her brother killed her. It’s the way she looks at people, as if they were…targets. Seeking out their weaknesses and secrets to be exploited.

Caitlin Todd knows a thing or two about secrets.

Of course, the way Tony and McGee and even Gibbs keep fussing over her doesn’t exactly help, not when they seem to be almost avoiding her.

It’s not as if she’s a part of their team. Sure, the new director said she should work a case or two, get the feel of how things are done in NCIS, but that was four cases ago, and now the Israeli sits in her pokey cubicle behind McGee’s desk and does a really poor job of pretending she’s not listening to every word that is said.

And Gibbs lets her get away with it!

More than that. He encourages it. Every other day it’s Ziva, can you find this, or Ziva, I need you to do that. And sure, she’s got some useful contacts, but they managed without her before!

Though a lot of things were different before.

But suddenly McGee and Tony are partnered pretty much full time and if they’re called to a crime scene she’s always the first one sent back to the yard, to sit at her desk and coordinate searches and put out BOLOs and that would be fine if she thought it was actually useful, but if computer work was suddenly so important, McGee would be far better at it than her, and she can’t shake the feeling that Gibbs is just getting people used to the idea that she’s not going to be around very much longer.

“Your door was open.”

“Always is.”

She stands in silence for a while, watching as he continues to sand, calm and even. She would kill for the man in front of her, die for him a hundred times over if he asked her to, and she is suddenly incensed by the way he’s been repaying that loyalty.

“You know, if you want me gone, you only needed to say something. This hazing is low, Gibbs. I thought better of you.”

“Hazing?” he looks over at her, actual surprise on his face.

“Whatever you want to call it. I’m not stupid, Gibbs, I can see what you’re doing. But if you want me gone then I’d rather you told me to my face, rather than slowly brush me under the carpet.”

“I don’t want you gone,” he shrugs, turning back to his boat.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

He glances at her, one eyebrow raised.

“I’ve been out twice in the two weeks, Gibbs, and even then it was to crime scenes you sent me away from as soon as you possibly could. You’ve been partnering Tony and McGee without variation, any excuse you can find to keep me at my desk and you take it…I’m a good agent, I’m damn good at my job, and if you can’t put one little incident behind you then just tell me so I can find somewhere new and Ziva can take my desk.”

“You got shot, Kate! You should be dead!”

“I can’t help it! You think I want to be like this? Keeping secrets from everyone I know and love, having to watch as they put themselves in danger to save my life when it never actually needs saving?”

“You really think I care about that?”

Kate falters for a moment, remembering Ducky’s words.

“Then…what?”

“You got shot. You should be dead.” Gibbs sighs, tossing his sander aside and heading for the bottle of bourbon on the side. “You _were_ dead.”

“And then I got better,” points out Kate softly, beginning to understand. “Gibbs, you can’t…protect me, not like this. Keeping me holed up in the yard. Our job is dangerous.”

“You think I don’t know that? Damnit, Kate, I know that better than anyone!”

“I can’t stay if you’re going to keep wrapping me up in cotton wool like this though. I mean, lets face it, I’m safest of all of us. When we’re all victims of a firey car crash thanks to your driving, I’m gonna be the one walking away afterwards.”

The fear of the scenario bleeds into her voice – not the car crash, necessarily, but something, someone, killing them all, Tim and Tony and Gibbs and even Ducky and Abby, leaving her behind to pick up their pieces. Wordlessly, he handed her a jar.

“You know I can’t stand this stuff.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I’m staying, then?"

“That’s up to you. Always has been.”

“What about Ziva?”

“What about Ziva?”

“I mean…well, she’s been working with us a lot. It’s easy to see that you like her.”

“Did I show Tony to door when McGee came?”

“Well, no…”

“Ziva’s got talent. Like Tony, like you, like McGee. I like talent. But I’m not about to clear out your desk just yet.”

* * *

Three days later, they get a dead petty officer in Deep Creak Park. Gibbs keeps her on the scene for ten hours, and when she finally stumbles back to the yard, half dead on her feet and functioning mainly on caffeine, she can’t remember a time she was happier.

* * *

The next time she dies, everything is different again. Gibbs is gone, she is Tony’s second, Ziva sits at McGee’s desk and somehow they’re still just about muddling through.

It’s a bullet – of course it’s a bullet, in this job what else could it be? – but this time it seems she is to be denied the quick and relatively painless death of a head shot. Instead, she’s lying on a wet alley floor at midnight while Ziva frantically tries to find the worst wound and stop the bleeding.

Kate wishes she wouldn’t. The pressure thing really is very painful.

“I’ll be alright,” she manages to slur around the haziness of her mind. “You don’t need to do that.”

“You will be fine,” agrees Ziva in a clipped voice. “You will lie there and not move and listen to me talking and do not dare close your eyes, Caitlin Rose Todd!”

Kate flutters her lids open again with a reluctant groan. “This would be a lot easier if you’d just shoot me in the head. I’ll be fine in no time then. Apart from the headache.”

“You are delirious. I am going to contact the others and an ambulance. They will be here soon.”

“No ambulance,” insists Kate, struggling weakly. “No hospitals.”

“You have been shot at least four times, Kate, and if you do not keep still then there will be no ambulance because you will be dead, and I am not going to be the one to tell Abby!”

“She’s gonna be mad,” she agrees with a giggle, lying back down again. “But don’t worry. McGee and Tony will explain when they get here. I’m gonna be fine.”

Ziva continued to talk and then shout, demanding her attention in a way that was really quite rude. Didn’t she see that if she’d just let her die, this would all be over far quicker?

She wished Tony were there. He’d probably shoot her if she asked. 

* * *

Jenny didn’t even raise an eyebrow when Tony requested Ziva fill the empty slot on their team. That was pretty much the only good thing that came out of the post-Gibbs mess; at least they didn’t have to put up with some probie, at least Ziva knew, maybe even understands, at least some of the deranged complexities that make up their team.

Kate’s not there when Tony explains it to Ziva, after the alley shooting incident. He had insisted McGee drive her back to the yard, despite her repeated protests that she was completely and utterly fine, and threatened to assign her to desk duty for a month if she made a fuss about Ducky examining her.

Much later that night – technically very early the next morning – she is woken by pounding on her front door. Ziva stands there in her running gear, her blank expression carefully in place.

“Why aren’t you still asleep?” Kate groans, stretching. The other half of their merry band had spent three more hours scouring the area for any sign of their perp before finally returning to the yard, and Tony had promised them another long day today.

“I have not been to sleep.” says Ziva shortly. “There was too much to think about. Tony says you do not die.”

Kate sighs. “I wish they’d get it straight. I do die, just not for very long.”

“He said it is a…genetic thing, yes?”

“It comes from my father’s side”

Ziva shakes her head slowly. “And the others, they all know about it?”

“I’m sorry, Ziva, it’s nothing personal. They all found about before you came, same way you did, really, when I got shot by…”

She trails off.

“By Ari, you mean?” finishes Ziva softly.

Kate nods.

Ziva’s eyes were unfocused, staring into the middle distance. She looked suddenly very young, vulnerable, completely unlike the self-contained officer Kate had to admit she enjoyed working with.

“Even after he died…even after I heard what he said to Gibbs, saw what he planned to do…I do not think I ever quite believed your story that he shot to kill and missed you on that roof. I knew Ari enough to know that he would never have missed such a shot, not unless it was on purpose. I had no doubt he would have killed Gibbs, but you…I think I still hoped there was enough of my brother left that he chose to let you live.”

“I’m sorry, Ziva,” sighs Kate, knowing it was inadequate but needing to say it anyway.

“I am not. I am…very glad you are not dead, Kate.”

* * *

Do they really want to do this? Risk their careers and possibly their lives for the stray dog that sniffed around the edges of their team for a year but has only really been a part of it for three months?

When Ziva faces down her would-be assassin and snaps that she’s _not just a killer anymore_, Kate hides her smile and manages not to shout _I told you so_ at the FBI agent’s faces. Ziva is one of them now, no matter what she might have done in the past, she’s part of their team, has her place amongst them and knows their deepest secret. She’s not going anywhere.

Of course, it gets a bit more complicated when Gibbs returns - a lot of things get a bit more complicated when Gibbs returns – but with a bit of creative thinking and some furniture rearrangement, they get by. 

* * *

When Kate was three, her mother married a widower with four children. Philip Todd loved his stepdaughter in his quietly unwavering way, and in return she adored him with every inch of her being, but he never really _understands_. Not just the Secret; she is too stubborn, too determined, too driven for the softly-spoken teacher.

She never regrets it, the anchor those steady years of her childhood give her, but for all that she loves her stepfamily she can never quite understand them. She knows they never quite understand her. 

* * *

Gibbs is never a father figure in her life. She admires and respects him, would kill for him in a heartbeat and die for him a hundred times over, but she doesn’t feel that same tie to him that holds Ziva and Tony and Abby. She has the father who raised her and loved her as his own, and the one who came back for her before she even realised she wanted him to, and that seems quite enough to be going on with.

It allows her to challenge Gibbs in a way the others won’t, face him down when she disagrees, because she can live with his anger and disappointment.

It means she can’t forgive him the way the others seem to, when he comes back from Mexico. Maybe they’re used to being let down by the people they trust, but Kate refuses to allow that to become normal for her.

She never understands how he failed to see what it did to them, how his abandonment sat with the team that rallied round him.

When Jack leaves, years later, she finally understands how they were so ready to have him back. 

* * *

Three weeks after her birthday she walks into work one morning to find her father perched on the edge of Tony’s desk, hands in pockets, completely at ease.

“Kitten!” he cries upon seeing her emerge from the lift.

“What are you doing here?!” she hisses in horror. There is no sign of the others yet, but the last thing she needs is for Tony to pick up her father’s ridiculous nickname.

“I was in the area. Thought I’d drop by and say hi.”

“You know where I live.”

“Yeah, but this way seemed more fun. I get to see the infamous NCIS!”

“What do you want, Jack?”

“Can’t a man stop by and see his daughter?”

“Not when stopping by involves a transatlantic flight.”

He looked her up and down for a moment, studying her with closer scrutiny. “Not even to say happy birthday?”

“That was three weeks ago. You sent a card.”

“It didn’t seem like enough. You’re getting older.”

Kate hesitates, picking up on the underlying meaning. She isn’t blind, she’s well aware that her father has not aged in any visible manner in the fifteen years she’s known him, and that he has lived many more years than his birth certificates would have people believe. She had never considered that it might happen to her too.

“At least one of us is,” she says at last, trying to think of the best way to ease his mind. He would not wish his fate on anyone, no matter how much he loves them, she knows that. 

* * *

He does end up meeting Tony. And the rest of them. He flirts with them all, of course, even Gibbs, but she’s not sure he can really help it, and mostly it’s just funny watching the expressions on her boss’s face.

They go out for dinner the night before he returns to Cardiff. It’s a warm and easy evening, and Kate can’t even bring herself to care that people keep mistaking them for siblings. Her father is calmer, more at ease with himself than she’s ever seen him, and she’s about to tell him as much when he beats her to it.

“They’re a good bunch, your team. I can see why you like them.”

Kate smiles and nods, because, well. She’s not about to dispute that. “I know.”

“You’re happy, with them. I’m glad. And I’m sorry I doubted them.”

“You seem happier too,” Kate observes carefully. For all that her father likes to be involved in her life, he’s amazingly close-mouthed about his own.

But he just smiles, and nods in acknowledgement. “I’ve got a team of my own now, actually. Odd bunch. Snarky as hell.”

Kate grins. “Sounds perfect.”

* * *

Maybe it comes with the genes, maybe she’d have had the talent anyway, but all her life Kate has been able to _sense_, in a way, when a person is dying. When she was eleven, they went to visit her Grandma Todd in Maryland, and she had cried the whole way home. The phone call had come three days later.

She doesn’t want to accept it, at first. For all her failings, for all her short-sightedness, she really, truly _likes_ the redheaded director of NCIS. She is firey and determined and able to go up against Gibbs without backing down, and there are few women Special Agent Caitlin Todd admires more.

She doesn’t deserve this, the slow, painful drift away, trapped in a body that is betraying her.

She had nightmares for a while, after they got back from LA, about arriving too late, discovering Jenny lying in a cool pool of her own blood. She had woken each time filled with relief, thankful for once for Ziva’s ridiculous driving, for her own quick thinking.

But over time, watching as the once-proud woman slips away bit by bit, she begins to wish she’d listened to that second sense, the one that told her Jenny Shepard’s time was through. 

* * *

It’s different with Ziva.

Ziva who once said she would never let them take her alive, but who spent four months in hell clinging onto _something_, never quite giving up completely no matter how much she might have wanted to. Something held her, something holds her still.

It doesn't matter what she says. The world is not yet done with Ziva David, and Ziva David is definitely not yet done with the world. 

* * *

Everyone – and by everyone, she mostly means Tony – assumes that the Catholic thing is because of her mother. Which is bollocks, really. She has her mother’s looks and her father’s genes, but her religion is completely and utterly her own, carved out in adolescence never to be relinquished. The traditions and ceremonies and rituals, familiar no matter where she goes or how much time passes. She can’t lose that comfort, that automatic acceptance into a community. If she lives to 90, she’ll be buried with full mass. If she’s still going at 900, if she’s lost everything and everyone she knows now and forgotten it all besides…at least she’ll still have that, two thousand years and more of faith behind her, the weight of a billion people’s belief to home and ground her.

It’s not really something she can explain, but of all of them she thinks Ziva might come closest to understanding.

* * *

“You and mom,” Kate asks, the last evening of one of her father’s impromptu trips to Washington. She’s slightly tipsy – not drunk, just well-oiled enough to face a question that’s bothered her ever since she first met her father. “How…”

“Did we meet?” asks her father with a wicked grin. He, dreadful man, never seems to be effected by alcohol, no matter how much he drinks. 

“Well. Yes.”

Jack laughs. “You’re as prudish as the Brits. I was trying to hunt down an old friend, but I missed him. Your mom was living with a friend and working in the university library for the summer; we met in a bar, and I ended up hanging round Washington for a couple of months. She was something else. Fiery. A true child of the sixties. We had some good times together.”

Kate looks at him, relaxed on her sofa with a fond smile on his face as he remembered long-ago years, and tries to reconcile the picture he is painting with the straight-laced, upstanding PTA member who had raised her.

“So what happened?” she asks softly.

Jack shrugs ruefully. “She loved me. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. We argued. She didn’t understand, there was so much I couldn’t tell her…and then, one night I was walking her home and I got into a…bit of a fight. I was stabbed. Luckily I came round before anyone else got there, but your mom…well, she didn’t take it too well. Understandable, really.”

“And then there was me.”

“No. I didn’t find out about you til later. I was back in the Washington, thought I’d call in and see her. Your mom had moved back to Indiana, but her friend still lived in the same apartment. Gave me an earful. I went out to see her. You were three weeks old. You threw up on me.”

“I always was a good judge of character.”

“Yeah. Well. She told me on no uncertain terms I was to get out of your lives and stay out. I’d ruined so much for her, I couldn’t do anything but agree.”

“She had no right to do that.”

“She had every right, Kitten. I broke her heart and ruined her life.”

“I don’t care. She shouldn’t have just shut you out like that, you had a right, _I _had a right…”

“She did what she thought was best, Kitten. She knew enough about me to know I was dangerous, and she was right. She just wanted you to be safe, and happy. She loves you, Kitten.”

“She has a funny way of showing it.”

“She worries about you. You had a good childhood, Kitten, be glad of that. Your mum was right to send me away. You love your dad, I know you do. I couldn’t have given you what he did.”

Kate thinks of the man her mother had married when she was two, the quiet, ever-patient man whose name she bore, and tried to imagine Jack in his place.

She can’t.

“Look. I’m not saying she’s perfect, but she did her best by you. And me. You know I picked your middle name?”

“She never said.”

“No, she’s good at that. But she gave me that, and enough information that I’d always be able to find you. She just wanted to protect you, Kitten.”

* * *

Vance is nothing like Jenny. He is cool and detached and his face is impossible to read, and Kate doesn’t trust him, no matter how much Gibbs seems to. He sends her to the archives when he breaks up the team. It’s a probie job, glorified secretarial work, checking and signing off evidence from decades-old cases, boring and dull and _safe. _No chance of anyone stumbling across her secret down here, unless she tries to kill herself from sheer boredom. At least McGee is in the next basement; Tony is hundreds of miles away and Ziva is…god knows where Ziva is.

Her days are spent cross referencing and making sense of obsolete filing methods and signing thousands of forms. Her evenings she spends pouring over their casefiles from the last three years, marking every success, highlighting in every way she can think of exactly why they as a team amount to so much more than the sum of their parts.

Night after night she carefully pieces their case together. There’s nothing else she can do in the face of Abby’s despair and McGee’s stoic acceptance and Gibbs’s typical silence. The false cheer in Tony’s postcards gets harder to bear with every passing week, and Ziva’s perfunctory emails are telling in their sparsity.

She wonders if they’ve been in contact with each other. 

* * *

“So,” says Abby one evening, plopping the drinks down on the sticky table between them. “Ziva and Tony.”

Kate sighs, and shakes her head. “I’ve got nothing, Abby, no more than you.”

“But you were with them _all the time. _Surely you must see _something.”_

“Maybe there’s nothing to see.”

“Oh no. There’s something.”

Kate has to concede on that point. It scares her, sometimes, the intensity that pulses between her two friends.

“There’s a line, though,” she sighs, trying to explain it to the scientist. “They won’t cross it.”

“Exactly,” smirks Abby, triumphant, her point proven. “None of the rest of us have ever had need for a line.”

Kate laughs and the conversation moves on, but it nags at her all the same. When she gets home she emails Tony the photos of Ziva in a bikini on a whim; if the Israeli ever finds out not even Abby would be able to connect her to Kate’s death, but somehow Kate doubts Tony will ever let on that he has them.

He never mentions them either, but his second day back on dry land he brings her a pastry from her favourite bakery and goes an entire morning without throwing anything at her.

Except things don’t go back to normal after that, despite her hopes. Tony’s not quite as carefree as he was and McGee is more outspoken, and Ziva…Ziva is keeping secrets. Kate knows that look all to well.

It’s only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces.

* * *

Her father rings almost six weeks after Gibbs and Tony return from Tel Aviv without Ziva.

“Kate?”

“Jack?” she blinks, because although the voice sounds like her father, it is tireder and older than she can remember ever hearing before. And he never calls her Kate.

“How are you?”

She looks around the bullpen. All is quiet, each of them pouring studiously over paperwork. No one is even pretending to eavesdrop on her conversation. She thinks of Abby downstairs, alternating between anger and confusion, Gibbs’ transition from selective mutism to all out brooding silences, the lost look in Tony’s eyes that he doesn’t even attempt to cover with false cheer.

She doesn’t look over at the empty desk that was Ziva’s. None of them do.

“I’m…ok. We’ve had a rough couple of months.”

“Anything I can do?”

Kate sighs, the noise rustling over the phone line. “No. No, not really. Did you want something?”

His turn to sigh. “No. Not really. Juts thought I should let you know, I’m going travelling for a bit. Off track. You won’t be able to get hold of me for a while.”

That breaks through her otherwise occupied mind, makes her sit up and take note.

“Jack? Is everything ok?”

“Yes. No. It’s…it’s been a rough couple of months here too. I need to get away for a bit. Take care of yourself, Kitten.”

He hangs up before she can reply. She doesn’t hear from him again for three years.

* * *

They refuse to let her go to Somalia. It only needs the three of them, they insist, and she gets that, gets that Tony has to do this, even if she doesn’t quite understand the bond between the agent and spy she understands that he needs to do this in a way they do not. And she doesn’t even consider that they go without Gibbs, but why send McGee on a suicide mission when she could do the same thing and walk away at the end of it?

Because, explains McGee through gritted teeth, _because_. If he gets killed, he gets killed, but if they discover her secret then gods knows what they’d do to her, and she’d have no way out, no chance of final escape.

It’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for her. She hates him for it.

* * *

Rachel rings her out of the blue one evening. It’s not that they don’t get on, exactly, it’s just that they both have very busy separate lives, and while she has to love her sister that doesn’t always equate to liking her.

“Look, I’m probably breaking some sort of law doing this, and definitely my contract, but I feel I should warn you. The psych department are onto your team. They don’t like you, they don’t like your methods, they don’t like that none of you have reported for any sort of mandatory counselling in years…they’re sending someone to watch you, and if the whole lot of you don’t pull yourselves together then they’ll rip you apart.”

Kate clutches the phone for a moment, terror and dread and a sickening sense of oh-god-no, because after everything, this can’t be what’s going to tear them apart.

“Who are they sending?”

“Me.”

* * *

She has her little apartment and her plants and her cat. She has her father, occasionally, and her Dad always. Rachel and Toby and James and a football team of nephews and nieces between them.

She has her team. She has Abby’s laughter and McGee’s stutter, Ziva’s quiet ferocity and Tony’s terrible humour. Ducky’s patience and Gibbs’ gut. The memory of Jenny. She has long afternoons pouring over evidence, the smell of sketching paper, the rush that comes when things finally start to fall together. She has each passing year, marked by grey hairs and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, by the steady rotation of the earth beneath her feet. Her dreams are filled with starlight, some vestige of her father’s genes, but her days are filled with earth and work and family, the day to day routine of a life so wholly worth living.

(and she lives, and she lives, and one day, in the fullness of time when the living is done, she dies. And that is all she could ever ask for). 

**Author's Note:**

> Again, there was _so much more_ of this. Kate and her sister, Kate and Ziva (a friendship I have many, many feelings about), her mother, Gibbs, all of it. But there we go. 
> 
> For those who were wondering, based on airdates/in show timelines Children of Earth (the 456) and Ziva’s disappearance in Somalia would have both happened at the same time. The 456 didn’t crop up stateside because reasons.


End file.
